I don't use bookmarks. Tabs are for things I want to read today or at least as long as the browser session's open (could be multi-day, but all in a chain of thought). If I don't get round to them I let them die under the justification "couldn't have been important enough" rather than carry baggage.
I have a personal wiki where I save links together with self-made notes and links/references associated with it. This provides a persistent record that is richer than that which bookmarks can provide, and can be accessed from any device that I happen to be on (my own devices, or devices that aren't my own, or links shared to others).
For regular sites, I too type in the URL and it usually autocompletes.
For myself, bookmarks have always fallen into a middle ground that I don't have much use for.
It's normal for me to have 100 or more tabs. Bookmarks are for more permanent sites - that I know I'll probably have to access multiple times later. If it's just a one time thing, it doesn't deserve to be a bookmark. At the most, it can be a 'ReadItLater' (Pocket) thing. I use Containers and Tab Groups extensively.
100 tabs on Chrome 10 years ago would not be very nice on the hardware. When you add Chrome's waste-of-space UI and horrible UX (broken ctrl+tab) with no option to change it, it's no wonder people didn't use more than a handful of tabs. On the other hand, if you had a browser that had no issues with it, you might get used to it.
So while it comes down to preference, I think the preference was highly influenced by the technology.
Do you never find yourself having to read through 10-20 pages to find a particular piece of information or to get a complete understanding of a topic? I find it really useful to be able to open up a lot of tabs from a single page and then run through them one by one.
> "I don't understand how people have more than about 10 tabs and stay sane. Do you people like... not use bookmarks at all?"
That's a weird assumption, I have several hundred bookmarks. Bookmarks and tabs have different UX and fill different roles. That's why you use 10 tabs and bookmarks, instead of 1 tab and bookmarks. That's why I use 30-40 tabs and bookmarks.
Bookmarks are for things I intend to open regularly. Tabs are for things I opened, decided it's interesting enough not to close, but not so interesting that I need to read it immediately.
I have 500 tabs open on my iPhone. It is sort of like a queue of content that I can read when I have excessive free time.
If you did read them when you had excessive free time, you wouldn't have 500 tabs open. It sounds like your evaluation function is too optimistic.
I'd like to write an extension that killed your old tabs after a while. I already have an idea to do that with a todo list app that automatically gets rid of your old items.
Since you're at 500 items in your queue, something about your workflow is obviously broken.
Either you spend too much time looking for new things to add to the queue, too little time processing the queue, both of the above, or you cast too wide a net for what you might possibly read one day.
Judgemental, are we ? 500 would be a low end for me. My avg hovers around 8 to 9 hundred. You probably dont understand his workflow and requirements. Let me guess they are likely different from yours.
800 to 900 unprocessed items in your incoming queue of items you want to read/view?
If you can knock one off every day you've got two and a half year's worth of items in your queue that you haven't even looked at yet? This is on top of all the things you are already consuming as part of your work or for leisure and at the same time assuming you don't add more things to the queue.
That's madness, and I don't care if you call me judgmental.
It is unreasonable to have that many items in your to-read queue. Stop adding things or start reading things faster (or better yet, both!)
Well I knock off a more than one. You do realize that length of a queue may be totally orthogonal to throughput.
And oh I sure have looked at them, but havent grokked them. Once I do that or I come back to them again and again then they get bumped to a bookmark. Lets say they are part of my job and leisure, sometimes I lose track which is which.
Think generational garbage collection. Tabs and bookmarks are the different generations. I still like tabs better as they preserve more context.
Btw some jobs require more researching than others. Regarding "madness" yes I agree.
Same here. The URL bar matches quite good most of the time, so it's more an omni-bar. If I need something, I type it in and it suggests me the page. Having the tab open will suggest me that tab.
But having so many tabs open makes the tab UI useless, so I prefer to close them.
Generally when researching something I'll pick a number of search terms, and for each, I'll actually open a few of the hits (in a new tab each time). Of those hits, most get closed right away once I actually look at them and see they're useless, of the rest, I might read a few, or follow the most relevant seeming links. (But usually close some large number of them)
Wash rinse repeat until I'm actually left with a very small set of things that are pertinent to the task at hand.
(This process does seem to leak slightly. I have to do a separate garbage collection pass once in a while.)
It's highly difficult on chrome. On Firefox, I use a userChrome.css hack to give me multi-row tabs (which was an old Firefox extension). I have 49 tabs open right now over 3 rows and I can easily read most of the titles on them.
I have never been able to use Chrome effectively because my browsing habits are so tied to being able see many tabs open at once. I almost always open links by opening them in a new tab and I always open a new tab when starting something new.
I only use bookmarks for sites I visit very often or definitely need at some point in the future and I know I'll remember. Bookmarks just aren't very useful.
General purpose universally available tools like Google Docs, which makes it easy to copy and paste links as well as rich text, graphics or anything else you want to describe them, and share and collaborate in real time, are an enormous improvement over bookmarks! There's really no point to using bookmarks any more.
Heck, most of the sites I visit on anything like a regular basis I only need to type in the first letter or two and they auto-complete.